Yelp is crooked and I can prove it.
 

Well, maybe not since they remove entire strings of reviews.

Anyway, don't trust what you read. I know, I was burned badly to the tune of $6000 and I did a review explaining in detail what went wrong with a contractor I hired to do AC installation at my home. The whole thread of reviews is gone.

I am a contractor.

You're experience?

same.
yelp.
sucks.

They are now posting scores for restaurants that were put out by the department of health for violations etc. It’s interesting, living in the city for as long as I have you realize that unless the place was built within a month you’re going to have issues of some type.

Yelp Google and hotel review sights are ALL just extortion schemes with a pretty face.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Give a store a mix review; great product, owner sucks.

Post and it stay up for less than 24 hrs.

eBay started this - years ago (I was one of the original users going back to the mid-1990s when it was still innovative and interesting). A few years later it became all about who would pay them more when they changed their previously objective feedback system allowing sellers to be able to essentially buy themselves better ratings. If you were a lousy seller with a clear pattern of mistreating customers getting bad feedback (and there certainly were some who deserved it!) it no longer mattered since you could pay off eBay and they’d scrub the negative feedback away (“pending investigation” or something which would never happen and eventually it’d just magically disappear). Wiped clean (“like with a cloth?”) It’s really not unlike another online P-car site I belonged to years ago. I got sick and tired of the same vendors / parts hawkers constantly getting away with murder while everyone else got held to another standard / set of rules. I’ll never go back. Yea I know... private companies can do what they want but I’m a private individual and so can I - neither company will ever see another dollar of mine.

It would be great to have objective reviews online away from the potential corrupting influence of money / bribing the review host site but it’s a difficult model to implement in practice and stay financially solvent. Angie’s List has done so to good effect but how long will it continue? At the end of the day SOMEONE has to pay for the site to operate / host (and constantly risk / fend off lawsuits from pissed-off scheisters who don’t like being called out - big $$$) and the minute a revenue stream is found (advertisers, donors, whomever) it inevitably comes with the potential for exploitation, manipulation and distortion of facts.

Yelp is good for seeing what’s around or open and little else. I don’t put much stake in the reviews. In addition to the above problems I know that companies pay people to trash their competition online (including on yelp) by making up plausible-sounding bad customer service stories (a friend of mine got approached about doing it). So yea it happens and there’s no way to prevent it.

The best rule is the advice my late grandfather gave me years ago: “believe none of what you hear and half of what you see”, to which I’d add “especially if it’s from the internet! Best to view it as mindless entertainment and nothing else”.

If you pay their fees then you’ll have a great rating. If you don’t, well then the reviews will probably at least be honest. Though I’ve noticed recently that some restaurants don’t even show up on Yelp, I assume because they aren’t paying? Just remember that if you aren’t paying for a service, then somebody else is.

This is old news

https://www.engadget.com/2014/09/02/yelp-escapes-extortion-lawsuit/

TLDR: [...]the plaintiffs lost because their claims didn't meet the requirements for an extortion case. They couldn't demonstrate that they had a right to hold on to those good reviews, or that Yelp had no right to demand payment. In other words, it's still possible that Yelp was pressuring stores to buy ads at the risk of losing positive buzz; it's just that no one was entitled to that buzz in the first place

Seems common knowledge that Yelp is rotten and corrupt, yet they keep humming along with most people thinking it's an honest, altruistic enterprise. I keep wondering why some show like "60 Minutes" doesn't blow them up.

Bad Yelp reviews?SmileWavy

Yell-extortion

There's Yelp looking for protection money.

and there are customers who want to punish a business over something trivial.

^ exactly

That would be like the pot calling the kettle black.

Same thing happened when I posted a bad review about a car dealer that tried to rip me off. I posted and two days later it was gone. So I posted another one stating that they can take this down as much as they want and I will just keep posting it. I copied and saved the review and every now and then when I am bored I just re post it.

I hate to be Captain Obvious here, but that's what car dealers do. (some exceptions)

That's like saying This lawyer I hired was nasty, and charged too much.

I hate this online review stuff I have one negative review that I know about, and it was someone who was never a customer, I sp9,,,,,,,,,,,..........z kja

To this day does that keep happening? You don't by chance have less than 3 reviews posted, do you? They'll normally take down your reviews if you have only 1 or 2.

Yelp is crooked and I can prove it.
 

I got a bad google review from a salesperson I refused to talk to. Wouldn’t take his card as I told him it would be a waste of his time since I had no need for his services. So the ****er, not even a client, goes on google and puts a bad review up. Spineless bag of **** enabled by a crap system.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I don't read Yelp. I assume the bad actors have paid the extortion for good ratings and the good actors have refused to pay out of principle and been punished with bad ratings.

I find it hard to believe they can continue to be in business. Yelp is a scam, sort of like when the mafia used to come to your business and ask for money to keep the peace...